Handout 2- Three Perspectives
Mexican Drug Cartels Leave a Bloody Trail on YouTube
By Manuel Roig-Fran zia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 9, 2007; A01
MEXICO CITY -- Bloody bodies -- slumped at steering wheels, stacked in pickup trucks,
crumpled on sidewalks -- clog nearly every frame of the music video that shook Mexico's
criminal underworld.
Posted on YouTube and countless Mexican Web sites last year, the video opens with blaring
horns and accordions. Valentín Elizalde, a singer known as the "Golden Rooster," croons over
images of an open- mouthed shooting victim. "I'm singing this song to all my enemies," he belts
out.
Elizalde's narcocorrido, or drug trafficker's ballad, sparked what is believed to be an
unprecedented cyberspace drug war. Chat rooms filled with accusations that he was promoting
the Sinaloa cartel and mocking its rival, the Gulf cartel. Drug lords flooded the Internet with
images of beheadings, execution-style shootings and torture.
Within months, Elizalde was dead, shot 20 times after a November concert. His enemies exacted
their final revenge by posting a video of his autopsy, the camera panning from Elizalde's
personalized cowboy boots to his bloodied naked body.
Elizalde's narco-ballad video and its aftermath highlight a new surge of Internet activity by
Mexican drug cartels, whose mastery of technology gives them a huge advantage over law
enforcement agencies. Following the model of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, the cartels have
discovered the Web as a powerful means of transmitting threats, recruiting members and
glorifying the narco-trafficker lifestyle of big money, big guns and big thrills.
"It's out of control," Victor Clark, a Tijuana-based drug expert, said in an interview.
Drug raids in Mexico now routinely net cameras, computers and intricate computerized
surveillance systems along with the usual piles of cash, cocaine and weapons. Hit men are just as
likely to pack video cameras as "goat's horns" -- the Mexican drug world's nickname for AK-47
assault rifles.
Mexican police have been slow to recognize the Internet as a font of clues, critics say, a mistake
that has increased the ability of the cartels to work in the open.
"Imagine, if you're a policeman, you can find gold here on these Web sites," said Alejandro Páez
Varela, an editor at the Mexican magazine Dia Siete who tracks drug gangs' use of the Internet.
"It's a shame. Everything's here: names, places. They even say who they are going to kill."
The videos, almost unheard-of a year ago, now show up with disturbing regularity. Last Monday,
Mexican newspaper Web sites published portions of a video of a supposed Gulf cartel hit man
being questioned by an off-screen interrogator about the February murders of five police officers
in Acapulco.
The man wears nothing but underwear. A large "Z" is scrawled in thick ink on his chest, along
with the words "Welcome, killers of women and children." The Z is a symbol of the Zetas, the
Gulf cartel's notorious hit squad, which was started by former Mexican army special forces
officers.
The full version of the video shows assassins decapitating the man by slowing twisting a wire
through his neck. It ends with a written threat: "Lazcano, you're next" -- an apparent reference to
Heriberto Lazcano, alleged chief of the Zetas.
Viewer comments on the video sites provide some of the possible clues police could be
investigating, Clark said. On one recent evening, viewers had posted what appeared to be death
threats on a YouTube page showing a bloody narcocorrido video.
"You have few days left, Miguel Treviño," wrote a user named "kslnrv."
"The Internet has turned into a toy for Mexican organized crime," Clark said. "It's a toy, a toy to
have fun with, a toy to scare people."
While terrorists have turned to the Internet to communicate with other terrorists, the Mexican
cartels appear to be using cyberspace mostly to taunt and threaten enemies. The videos can be
explicit or cryptic. Inserting code words is part of the game for drug dealers who delight in
leaving riddles to be unscrambled by their rivals and police officers.
Mexican researchers are beginning to examine these Internet postings to monitor who is up and
who is down in the drug wars. Páez Varela is tracking an increase in videos posted by the
Sinaloa cartel, many of which tout the supposed virtues of its leader, Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán.
Guzmán, who escaped from a high-security Mexican prison in 2001, and his backers appear to
be posting more videos of his hit men carrying out executions in parts of Mexico once thought to
be under control of the Gulf cartel.
"What Chapo Guzmán is saying is that his militant arm is strong, not just in Sinaloa, but in
Veracruz, the state of Tamaulipas and the state of Tabasco," Páez Varela said. "It's like an
advertisement."
But the other side is advertising, too, even though its leader, Osiel Cárdenas, was recently
extradited to the United States. A video homage to Cárdenas has proliferated on the Web,
boasting that he is still powerful.
"With an order from the boss, more heads will roll," an unknown performer sings. As the singer
wails, the screen fills with an image of a blood-smeared floor and four heads severed from their
bodies. It ends with a pistol shot into the forehead of a supposed gang member and a gushing
wound.
"Mexican law enforcement is ill-equipped to deal with this," Andrew Teekell, an analyst at
Stratfor, a private intelligence firm based in Texas, said in an interview. "In the U.S., posting
videos like that would be plain crazy -- U.S. law enforcement has guys who do nothing but surf
the Internet. But in Mexico, they can get away with it. It shows these cartels are untouchable."
Mexico's federal police agency has a cybercrimes unit, but it has produced few important drug
busts. In the meantime, most local police forces pay little atte ntion to the Internet, Clark said. A
federal police spokesman declined to discuss ongoing investigations, but said a concerted effort
is now being made to track drug gangs on the Internet.
"The police are not taking what narcos post on the Internet serious ly," Clark said. "It's a mistake.
In terms of investigations, you have to take advantage of all available information."
YouTube, which appears to be the most popular destination for the cartels' videos, removes those
flagged by users as objectionable. But the violent clips frequently reappear on the site shortly
after being removed. Online comment sections attached to videos disappear, but fill up again
when the videos return. The online discussions, in Spanish, are often filled with threats, overt
and veiled, as well as streams of profanities.
Mexican drug dealers have for years commissioned composers to write songs in their honor.
Now, the Internet is suddenly turning some of them into superstars. None is bigger than Valentín
Elizalde.
When he was alive, he never had a best-selling album. But less than four months after his murder
and half a year after "To My Enemies" became an Internet hit, Elizalde made it big. On March 3,
when Billboard came out with its list of best-selling Latin albums in the United States, Elizalde
occupied the top two spots.
Drug cartels raise the stakes on human smuggling
Exploitation of illegal immigrants has become worse, officials say, and the failure of U.S. agencies to work
together has hindered efforts to stop the organizations.
By Josh Meyer
March 23, 2009
Reporting from Washington — Mexican drug cartels and their vast network of associates have
branched out from their traditional business of narcotics trafficking and are now playing a central
role in the multibillion-dollar-a-year business of illegal immigrant smuggling, U.S. law
enforcement officials and other experts say.
The business of smuggling humans across the Mexican border has always been brisk, with many
thousands coming across every year.
But smugglers affiliated with the drug cartels have taken the enterprise to a new level -- and
made it more violent -- by commandeering much of the operation from independent coyotes,
according to these officials and recent congressional testimonies.
U.S. efforts to stop the cartels have been stymied by a shortage of funds and the failure of federal
law enforcement agencies to collaborate effectively with one another, their local and state
counterparts and the Mexican government, officials say.
U.S. authorities have long focused their efforts on the cartels' trafficking of cocaine, marijuana, heroin
and methamphetamines, which has left a trail of violence and corruption.
Many of those officials now say that the toll from smuggling illegal immigrants is often far worse.
The cartels often further exploit the illegal immigrants by forcing them into economic bondage or
prostitution, U.S. officials say. In recent years, illegal immigrants have been forced to pay even more
exorbitant fees for being smuggled into the U.S. by the cartel's well-coordinated networks of
transportation, communications, logistics and financial operatives, according to officials.
Many more illegal immigrants are raped, killed or physically and emotionally scarred along the way,
authorities say. Organized smuggling groups are stealing entire safe houses from rivals and trucks full of
"chickens" -- their term for their human cargo -- to resell them or exploit them further, according to
these officials and documents.
Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) said greed and opportunity had prompted the cartels to move
into illegal immigrant smuggling.
"Drugs are only sold once," Sanchez, the chairwoman of the House Homeland Security border
subcommittee, said in an interview. "But people can be sold over and over. And they use these people
over and over until they are too broken to be used anymore."
The cartels began moving into human smuggling in the late 1990s, initially by taxing the coyotes as they
led bands of a few dozen people across cartel-controlled turf near the border.
After U.S. officials stepped up border enforcement after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the price of
passage increased and the cartels got more directly involved, using the routes they have long used for
smuggling drugs north and cash and weapons south, authorities said.
Sometimes they loaded up their human cargo with backpacks full of marijuana. In many cases, they
smuggled illegal immigrants between the two marijuana-growing seasons, authorities said.
Kumar Kibble, deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs
Enforcement's office of operations, said the cartels made money by taxing coyotes and engaging in the
business themselves.
"Diversification has served them well," Kibble said.
Unlike the drug-trafficking problem, the cartels' involvement in human smuggling has received scant
attention in Washington.
That is the case even as the Obama administration and Congress increasingly focus their attention on
Mexico, fearing that its government is losing ground in a battle against the cartels that has resulted in
the deaths of more than 7,000 people since the beginning of 2008.
At one of many congressional hearings on the subject last week, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) unveiled a
chart that he said described the cartels' profit centers: drugs, weapons and money laundering.
"I would add one thing, senator," said Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard, who then described to Durbin
his concerns about the cartels' movement into illegal immigrant smuggling. "It is really a four-part trade,
and it has caused crime throughout the United States."
Arizona has become the gateway not only for drugs, but also illegal immigrants. Fights over the valuable
commodity have triggered a spate of shootings, kidnappings and killings, Goddard and one of his chief
deputies said in interviews.
In Arizona, the cartels grossed an estimated $2 billion last year on smuggling humans, Goddard said.
Senior officials from various federal law enforcement agencies confirmed that they were extre mely
concerned about the cartels' human smuggling network.
In recent years, the U.S. government has taken significant steps to go after illegal immigrant smugglers
on a global scale, setting up task forces, launching public awareness campaigns and creating a Human
Smuggling and Trafficking Center to fuse intelligence from various agencies.
But at the southern border, the effort has stumbled, in part because Homeland Security and various
Justice Department agencies have overlapping responsibilities and are engaging in turf battles to keep
them, Goddard and numerous other federal and state officials said.
The vast majority of ICE agents cannot make drug arrests, for instance, even though the same smugglers
are often moving illegal immigrants.
The reason: The Drug Enforcement Administration has not authorized the required "cross-designation"
authority for them, according to Kibble and others. A top DEA official said that was partly to prevent ICE
agents from unwittingly compromising ongoing DEA drug investigations and informants working the
cartels.
Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives focus almost exclusively on cartel
efforts to smuggle large quantities of American-made weapons into Mexico.
"The only way we're going to be successful is to truly mount a comprehensive attack upon the cartels.
They're doing a comprehensive attack on us through all four of these different criminal activities,"
Goddard told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
"I'm afraid in this country we tend to segregate by specialty the various areas that we are going to
prosecute. And our experience on the border is we can't do that. We've got to cross the jurisdictional
lines or we're going to fail."
Kibble agreed, saying that the cartels' diversification will require federal agencies to work together. "It
means we need more teamwork so things don't slip through the cracks."
He added: "We are very focused on it and applying law enforcement pressure to all aspects of the
cartels' activities."
Asked for comment, Justice Department officials referred calls to Homeland Security.
But authorities are also hampered by budget shortcomings and other obstacles.
Even though ICE has primary responsibility over illegal immigrant smuggling, it has only 100 agents
dedicated to the task, Kibble said.
There is no line item in ICE's budget for human smuggling, so no one knows how much money is being
spent on it, he told Sanchez's border subcommittee, before acknowledging that the agency needs more
resources to fight the problem.
There are also not enough resources for providing medical treatment and protection for those illegal
immigrants who are caught, so many of them are not available to testify, said Anastasia Brown, the
director of refugee programs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
As a result, there have been relatively few prosecutions and convictions.
In fiscal 2008, ICE initiated 432 human smuggling investigations, including 262 cases of alleged sexual
exploitation and 170 cases of suspected labor exploitation.
Those efforts resulted in 189 arrests, 126 indictments and 126 convictions related to human smuggling,
according to Homeland Security documents provided to Congress.
Cameron H. Holmes, an assistant Arizona attorney general at the front lines of the fight against crossborder human smuggling, agreed that federal authorities were trying to collaborate better.
"Are they working together enough? Absolutely not. Are they being successful? Look around," Holmes
said, before describing details of illegal immigrant smuggling cases in which people were killed or
enslaved for years.
"We have a multibillion criminal industry that has grown up in the last 10 years and it all involves
violations of federal law. I would not call that a success."
EXCLUSIVE: 100,000 foot soldiers in Mexican
cartels
Sara A. Carter (Contact)
EXCLUSIVE:
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico
The U.S. Defense Department thinks Mexico's two most deadly drug cartels together
have fielded more than 100,000 foot soldiers - an army that rivals Mexico's armed forces
and threatens to turn the country into a narco-state.
"It's moving to crisis proportions," a senior U.S. defense official told The Washington
Times. The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the
sensitive nature of his work, said the cartels' "foot soldiers" are on a par with Mexico's army
of about 130,000.
The disclosure underlines the enormity of the challenge Mexico and the United States
face as they struggle to contain what is increasingly looking like a civil war or an insurgency
along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the past year, about 7,000 people have died - more than
1,000 in January alone. The conflict has become increasingly brutal, with victims beheaded
and bodies dissolved in vats of acid.
The death toll dwarfs that in Afghanistan, where about 200 fatalities, including 29 U.S.
troops, were reported in the first two months of 2009. About 400 people, including 31 U.S.
military personnel, died in Iraq during the same period.
The biggest and most violent combatants are the Sinaloa cartel, known by U.S. and
Mexican federal law enforcement officials as the "Federation" or "Golden Triangle," and its
main rival, "Los Zetas" or the Gulf Cartel, whose territory runs along the Laredo,Texas,
borderlands.
The two cartels appear to be negotiating a truce or merger to defeat rivals and better
withstand government pressure. U.S. officials say the consequences of such a pact would be
grave.
"I think if they merge or decide to cooperate in a greater way, Mexico could potentially
have a national security crisis," the defense official said. He said the two have amassed so
many people and weapons that Mexican President Felipe Calderon is "fighting for his life"
and "for the life of Mexico right now."
As a result, Mexico is behind only Pakistan and Iran as a top U.S. national security
concern, ranking above Afghanistan and Iraq, the defense official added.
Other U.S. officials and Mexico specialists agreed with this assessment.
Michael V. Hay den, who left as CIA director in January, put Mexico second to Iran as a
top national security threat to the United States. His successor, Leon E. Pa netta, told
reporters at his first news conference that the agency is "paying ... a lot of attention to"
Mexico.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday that
"the stakes are high for the safety of many, many citizens of Mexico and the stakes are high
for the United States no doubt."
In a December interview with The Times, President Bush said his successor would need
to deal "with these drug cartels in our own neighborhood. And the front line of the fight will
be Mexico."
A State Department travel advisory last month seemed timed to caution U.S. students
contemplating spring breaks south of the border.
"Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resem bled
small-unit combat, with cartels employ ing automatic weapons and grenades," the advisory
said.
Independent analysts warn that narco-terrorists have infiltrated the Mexican
government, creating a shadow regime that further complicates efforts to contain and
destroy the cartels.
"My greatest fear is that the tentacles of the shadow government grow stronger, that the
cartels have penetrated the government and that they will be able to act with impunity and
that this ever stronger shadow government will effectively evolve into a narco-state," said
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute in Washington.
The Mexican Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the
drug war.
Mr. Calderon, however, has adamantly denied assertions that Mexico is becoming a
failed state.
The Mexican government has "not lost any part - any single part - of the Mexican
territory to drug cartels," he recently told the Associated Press.
His comments run counter to the im pressions of U.S. law enforcement officials and
some Mexican journalists reporting in Ciudad Juarez, a city just across the border from El
Paso, Texas.
On a recent morning here, the once-bustling border town of 1.3 million was more like a
ghost town.
"It's empty," said a vendor of freshly baked tortillas and salsa, who asked to be identified
only by her first name, Maria. "We are in a losing war against the narco-traffickers. My
business is dying, and soon it will join the graveyard of businesses that have had to close
down. No one comes Juarez anymore."
More than 1,800 people have been killed in the city since last year. The number
continued to climb as The Times visited, with more than 20 deaths in one week.
In response to the challenge, U.S. and Mexican authorities have stepped up raids on
cartel members in both countries.
Last week, U.S. and Mexican forces arrested 755 people, including 52 in the United
States associated with the Sinaloa cartel. However, cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo"
Guzman is still at large. He is thought to be living in Sinaloa and protected by hired gunmen
and Mexican federal officials on his payroll, said a U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing intelligence operations.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spokesman Garrison Courtney said last week's
raids put a dent in cartel operations but that public attention to the crisis has been long in
coming.
"If we don't start paying attention, the violence - which has already spilled into the U.S. is going to get worse," Mr. Courtney said. "This is a shared interest between the United
States and Mexico to go after these drug traffickers."
In recent years, however, U.S. officials have been reluctant to share information with
Mexican counterparts, fearing that they will leak to the cartels.
DEA officials interviewed by The Times said the Sinaloa cartel employs Mexican federal
officials, while other cartels pay off local governments and police.
"Many times, what you see isn't really what's going on," said a DEA official, who asked
not to be named because of the nature of his work. "Many times the death of federal officers
or local police isn't a cartel making the hit, but the cartels themselves in the government
fighting one another. The same thing has happened to the Mexican army, where the cartels
have also bought loyalty to move dope into the U.S."
Mr. Courtney said the Mexican cartels have "evolved into the Colombian cartels of the
1980s. Even the government's reaction to what's going on there right now and over the last
five years is what the government of Colombia faced when they went after Pablo Escobar.
Juarez has seen an escalation in that same type of brutal violence."
Escobar was a Colombian drug lord who died in 1993.
More than 2,000 Mexican army soldiers and 425 federal police are patrolling in
Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located. More than 45,000 Mexican troops have
been engaged in the drug war since Mr. Calderon took office in 2006.
Mr. Carpenter said the use of the Mexican military may be backfiring.
"I said at the time when Calderon called the military to take the lead role in confronting
the cartels that he was undertaking a massive gamble," Mr. Carpenter said. "It is clear now
that he is losing that gamble if he has not already lost it."
A U.S. counterterrorism official said, however, that the severity of the crisis was bringing
the U.S. and Mexican governments closer and that the CIA will work closely with Mexico if
asked for guidance.
"Both countries have a common interest in clamping down on the cartels, and that has
shaved away some of the underly ing historical tensions in what has long been a close
relationship with Mexico," said the official, who spoke on the condition that he not be
named. "The Mexicans understand - perhaps more so than at any time in recent memory that we are genuine about taking these people on."
Meanwhile, thousands of Mexicans daily cross the Santa Fe bridge, which connects
Ciudad Juarez to El Paso, ironically one of the safest U.S. cities.
"Why should we have to live like this?"asked Maria, the vendor. "Why do our children
have to die, while our neighbors live like nothing is happening? Every day we pray for
something different, for peace. Every day our prayers are left unanswered."